Around The Block Blog

by Nicholas Sweere, Product Marketing Manager, Dell Compellent — August 11, 2011

The release of Replay Manager 6 provides many new features for taking Replays, or snapshots, of server environments. While it can be complicated and difficult to run and manage business critical applications -- such as SQL databases, Exchange and Hyper-V – taking and managing Replays shouldn’t be. The latest release of Replay Manager enhances and simplifies management capabilities so administrators can spend less time on Replays and more time on their server environment.

Below is an overview of three of the new features now available with Replay Manager 6:

1. Multiple Instance Management
   Now multiple instances of Replay Manager can be managed through a single centralized management interface. This feature eliminates the need to switch between Replay Manager interfaces, simplifying the management of Replays of server applications such as SQL, Exchange and Hyper-V. This new management interface can be installed on a server, VM or a desktop to ease traditional management challenges.
   
2. Windows PowerShell Scripting
   Many users prefer using Cmdlet scripting over a traditional GUI. Replay Manager now supports 43 PowerShell Cmdlets, providing all management capabilities found within Replay Manager’s GUI. PowerShell scripting greatly reduces the time required and difficulty of completing complex and/or repetitive tasks when taking snapshots of server applications.
   
3. SQL Restore without Recovery
   When recovering a SQL database using Dell Compellent space-efficient snapshots, users are now able to restore the database by recovering it. This new feature allows database administrators to apply backup logs to enable an even more granular recovery of their database – recovery between snapshots.

For a demo of Replay Manager 6.0 click below.

 

by Bruce Kornfeld, Lead, Dell Storage Alliances — September 07, 2010

Looking back in time, backing up data from desktops and servers to tapes made sense. There are just too many things that can go wrong with an IT system; you’d be foolish not to back up your data. Having that insurance policy sitting on a shelf or at an offsite location was critical. If an “event” occurred, the clock starts ticking and it is IT’s job to bring their organization back online. How long? A few hours? A few days? A week? Looking toward the future, using tape as an insurance policy for bad things happening in the datacenter just won’t work for much longer. Data sets are too large, pipes from tape back to disk are too slow, and the time it takes to physically find tapes, ship tapes and restore from tape just doesn’t cut it anymore. The pace of information flow and business change will be too fast for restoring from tape in the future. (Are we already there today?)

Alternatives to tape backup

There are many technologies out there offering superior ways to ensure that operations can be back up and running shortly after any “event” or to avoid downtime completely—based on budget, of course.  Many forward-thinking IT departments back up data to disk so that restores happen almost instantly. No more searching for the right tapes and waiting for tapes to spin in order to get back up and running. Some of the techniques that create backup sets on disk available today include:

• Increase the snapshot frequency on primary storage—manage those snapshots with the disk vendor’s user interface or a backup application. The data is already there ready to be used. These snapshots can also be sent to another physical disk system to provide extra protection.
• Use backup software (the way you always have) and write to disk instead of tape—a pretty common practice these days. The data could also be de-duplicated within the target disk. However, I suspect many are still ALSO writing the same data to tape—is this really necessary?
• De-dupe the data at the server and then send to disk—another method that is gaining momentum because less data needs to be sent to the backup disk—less to manage.
• Send backup sets to another location for disaster avoidance—bandwidth is a lot cheaper than it was 10 years ago and if you’re sending snapshots or de-duplicated backup sets the amount of disk needed in the remote location can be price competitive with sending, storing and managing tape after tape after tape...
  

What about accessing “old" data?

All of this discussion was about backup—being ready in case something bad happens. What about accessing all the old data that doesn’t really need to be accessed frequently? SEC filings from 3 years ago. Engineering drawings from the last product revision. Surveillance video. The CEOs keynote speech from the customer event 2 years ago. This is where an active archive comes in.

As a disk vendor, we’d LOVE to think that every organization would store their data on their primary storage disk forever. But that’s just not reality. Automatically tiering data within your primary storage is a great thing. But now there are techniques to create archives on secondary disk and tape systems so that your organization can have fast access to the information they need. It might appear that I’m suggesting that data never goes away. It just moves from fast disk to slower disk to tape over time—staying online and available the whole way. That’s the whole point. Archiving software is intelligent enough these days to help IT departments decide how long data needs to stay available so managing this process is getting easier. The key difference here is that these archives can now be on tape systems. Tape for archives—YES. Tape for backup—NO. Maybe the industry as a whole isn’t ready for this yet—but more and more will be moving there over time.

by Liem Nguyen, Director of Communications and Social Media, Dell Storage — May 11, 2010

Our partners at Citrix and Microsoft are making it easier for Compellent Fluid Data storage users and channel partners to plan cloud computing projects. A few weeks ago, Compellent announced our work with Microsoft on the dynamic infrastructure toolkit for cloud computing. This week the Compellent team will be demonstrating more of our next-gen cloud technology support for both Citrix and Microsoft virtualization platforms at Citrix Synergy in San Francisco.

In Compellent booth no. 300 in the Moscone Center tomorrow May 12 through May 14, we’re going to showcase support for the next evolution of the Citrix Ready program: StorageLink version 2.2. The upcoming StorageLink 2.2 code from Citrix will include the Compellent Storage Adapter, which integrates provisioning, management and recovery of Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines through the StorageLink interface.

The wow factor will be our demo for Site Recovery integration. It’s future technology from both Compellent and Citrix, which will automate setup and execution of disaster recovery of Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V workloads. I can’t go into more detail right now but we’re working on enabling customers to integrate Compellent continuous snapshots and thin replication with Site Recovery.

Stay tuned for more official words from Citrix and Compellent. In the meantime, don’t miss our demonstrations of Compellent, Citrix and Microsoft cloud tech at Synergy.

If you can't make it to Synergy, here's a video demo that walks through some of the technical features of the StorageLink 2.2 GUI with Compellent integration. We'll have the second demo with Site Recovery next week.

Let us know if you're going to Synergy. If you're already using StorageLink or plan to use it with Site Recovery we'd love to hear from you.